Fromm on Self Awareness

One cannot learn to concentrate without becoming sensitive to oneself. What does this mean? Should one think about oneself all the time, “analyze” oneself, or what?…

If we look at the situation of being sensitive to another human being, we find the most obvious example in the sensitiveness and responsiveness of a mother to her baby. She notices certain bodily changes, demands, anxieties, before they are overtly expressed. She wakes up because of her child’s crying, where another and much louder sound would not waken her. All this means that she is sensitive to the manifestations of the child’s life; she is not anxious or worried, but in a state of alert equilibrium, receptive to any significant communication coming from the child. In the same way one can be sensitive toward oneself. One is aware, for instance, of a sense of tiredness or depression, and instead of giving in to it and supporting it by depressive thoughts which are always at hand, one asks oneself “what happened?” Why am I depressed? The same is done by noticing when one is irritated or angry, or tending to daydreaming, or other escape activities. In each of these instances the important thing is to be aware of them, and not to rationalize them in the thousand and one ways in which this can be done; furthermore, to be open to our own inner voice, which will tell us – often rather immediately – why we are anxious, depressed, irritated. [Emphasis mine]

Fromm points out that simple knowledge of your mental state may be of limited use if you can’t figure out why you are feeling what you are feeling, and end up having to work backward to figure it out (“rationalizations,” in his language). It is the immediate noticing when something changes in your emotions and inner state, combined with the “openness to your own inner voice”, which results in real self-awareness.

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This is wonderful to read. Would you consider this philosophy? I took a few philosophy courses as an undergrad, but we did not read anything on “mental life” and how we live. Maybe I just took the wrong classes, but analytic philosophy as best as I can tell (and I’m far from being an expert or close to these things) seems to have veered away from this sort of thinking. Seems a shame to me.

I’ll let the local philosophy expert weigh in, but I would think it’s more psychology than philosophy, we just don’t have a psychology category yet. Maybe we need a “Mental Life” category. Erich Fromm in general does seem to straddle both worlds, though, and I admit I have wondered the same thing (in terms of categorization).

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To be honest, I didn’t notice that this was marked in the philosophy category. I’m so glad it was! My point was not to question whether this was philosophy; it was the opposite, to ask why more philosophy isn’t like this.

Seems to me like analytic philosophy is dedicated to a lot of esoteric topics (“how do objects endure” “what defines a type or class” “what exactly is meant by subjunctives and is it even possible for subjunctive to exist”, “what is the meaning of identity”, etc.), but that the nature of philosophy (love of wisdom and thinking about the nature of inner life and how life can be lived wisely) is well suited to this sort of thing. Psychologists don’t seem to be so concerned with wisdom as they are with the process the mind takes and how that process is imperfect but I know a few academic psychologists and they don’t value “real self awareness” any more than a mathematician would.

My general inclination is not to use the term “philosophy” fairly liberally, although I’m not opposed to creating other labels.

As for Conservative’s question, “why more philosophy isn’t like this”, I’m going to assume that you were educated in the US or UK, where philosophy is more associated with logic and generally limited to subjects that lend themselves to rigorous analysis. This is one reason why interest in philosophy of religion has waned in mainstream American philosophy departments.

[…] of others. If you are careful and gentle with your own inner voice (to borrow a term from the last post), listening to it, validating it, hearing it, you will do the same to others, seeing them and […]

I’ve noticed that this sensitivity towards one’s self also spills over into our decision-making. I usually know when I’m about to make a bad choice, even if I rationalize it away, because of an uncomfortable feeling in my gut.

In general, I find it’s easy to slip into denial about how we feel or about why we do things. Being honest with myself can be more difficult than rationalizing myself into denial about how I really feel and why I feel that way, because realizing that honesty requires letting go of thought and reasoning for a moment and just letting the answer float to the surface.